Since the 1980s, an exodus of Indigenous communities from Mexico to the United States has generated a social, cultural, economic, and political exchange between the two countries. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted that exchange, altering the lives of families that had already been fractured. In his photographs, Yael Martínez captures a tapestry of family, religion, ritual, poverty, longing, loss, and what it means to leave one’s home behind. He was born in the Mexican state of Guerrero, where many of these images were made, and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 21.

Martínez’s story, “Turning Darkness Into Light,” focuses on the immigrants often cut from this nation’s narrative: the Indigenous peoples of Central America. His photographs remind us that the histories of the modern-day Aztec and Maya, of Mesoamerica, do not belong only in history books; rather, as descendants of some of the first immigrants to the continent, their ancestors traveled through North America before there were borders or cities. Today these comunidades originárias—or “original communities,” as Martínez calls Indigenous people—rise from adversity and escape violence hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families. In leaving their remote villages of Mexico and finding their way to the city of immigrants—New York—Martínez sees his own story in their faces, in their customs, and in the communities they build together, where they find a new home.

Turning Darkness into Light

Featuring: Yael Martínez

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• #Community
• #Mexico
• #Resilience
• #Trauma & Healing